Monday, July 29, 2013

One of the many perks of my job is that I get to spend a lot
of time on the phone, calling people who have no interest in talking to me.

Wait
perk is not the right word. Oh well, it’ll come to me.

Anyway,
when your job involves making cold calls, it usually means you spend most of
your time talking to receptionists and voice mails.

I’ve
got no beef with the receptionist crowd. They’re just trying to do their job:
keep hooligans like me from bothering their boss, while I do mine: kinda sorta
bother their boss.

The
voice mails are another story.

Obviously
the most annoying voice mail is the tried and true: “Hi! (needlessly long pause,
just long enough for me to introduce myself before the rest of the message
kicks in) You’ve reached so and so who works somewhere and so forth.”

It’s
2013. It’s unforgivable people in America still kind this gag funny. If we
moved past Dane Cook, can’t we leave this one behind, too?

So that
one takes the top spot, but sliding into second is a phenomenon that’s much
lesser known, but still pretty initiating.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

I’ve already spoken at length about my oddball bathroom
habits and yet somehow I haven’t even managed to scratch the surface.

Take,
for example, this awkward situation I found myself in the other day.

It all
began, as many bathroom stories do, at lunch.

I’m a bit of a loner by nature, but
never more so than when I’m eating. If there’s food around me, I’d rather not
talk. I’d rather eat. Maybe it’s because I suck at multitasking and this is my subconscious’
way of keeping me from starving to death.

Anyway, because I’m a solitary
eater, I take my lunch break at my desk very nearly every day, usually with a
pair of headphones on to complete the job of sealing me off from the outside
world.

My distraction of choice for most
lunch breaks is a podcast, and that fine day I believe I was listening to the
latest episode of Dan Harmon’s humorous “Harmontown.”

So after finishing up my lunch, I decided
to take a trip to the bathroom, headphones still on.

Now I usually don’t like walking
around with headphones on because my workplace has a lot of blind corners and I
like to be able to hear when people are approaching. You know, so I don’t bump
into anyone or scare the beejesus out of myself.

Monday, July 22, 2013

The other night I watched that sorta-new survival reality
show “Naked and Afraid,” where a guy and a gal are dropped off at some exotic
location to survive for a few weeks with no clothes, minimal tools and a camera
crew taping their every move.

It’s
OK. The participants are indeed naked, but the only truly scary part was during
the horribly awkward and stilted conversation the two people had when they
first met, wearing nothing but their birthday suits and a smile.

Tangent
alert! The episode I watched broke one of my cardinal rules: It proclaimed to
be “Uncensored,” but was, in fact, censored. I saw no boobies or man parts or
lady parts. Why? Because they were blurred out. If I can’t hear a lady drop the
“F” bomb while waving a nipple around, then you have no right to call your show
“Uncensored.”

Not
that I really wanted to see any of those things. Our heroes weren’t exactly
lookers, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Anyway,
early in the show, the participants are graded in three areas essential to
making it through the show in one piece. They are graded using a 0-10 scale on:
Outdoor Skills, Experience and Mental Toughness.

Those
three scores are then averaged together to give you the Primitive Survival
Rating (PSR), or how good the person is likely to do on the show.

That
got me thinking. What would my PSR be? I’m already fairly confident I’d be a complete
disaster on the show. I have way too many body issues for me to ever get over
being naked in front of a stranger and there aren’t enough poisonous snakes,
giant spiders or killer plants in all the jungles to make me forget that.

Monday, July 15, 2013

As a young lad, my “Godzilla” toys occupied a good deal of
my time. They weren’t my favorites, my “Terminator 2” toys held that crown, but
the “Godzilla” crew was high on my list.

I had a
big, sorta-crummily painted Godzilla whose arms and legs you could move, but
only in a pretty unrealistic motion. I hate a big brownish pterodactyl my dad
got surprised me with one day when he picked me up from school. Even though it
was just a dinosaur, I happily pretended it was Godzilla’s sometimes winged-friend,
sometimes winged-foe, Rodan.

One
Christmas I also acquired a fun little set of Godzilla’s entire catalogue of co-monsters,
although they were much smaller than the other two, which kind of limited
cross-over opportunities, but when you’re a kid, you make due.

All of
this is just a wildly long-winded way of telling you that I was pretty psyched
when I first heard about Guillermo del Toro’s monsters vs. robots slugfest “Pacific
Rim.”

If
there’s one man who I trust implicitly with my beloved childhood memories of
wearing out my VHS copies of Japanese monster movies, it’s del Toro, a guy who I’m
sure was doing the same thing when he was a boy. Maybe to this day, even.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Over the last week or so, my lady friend and I ventured out
to our local movie houses to see a pair of kids’ movies.

First
up was “Monsters University,” Pixar’s prequel to its 2001 hit “Monsters, Inc.”

“Monsters,
Inc.” was never really all that high up in Pixar’s catalogue for me. It’s not
particularly low either, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of the middle.
I’ve seen it once, thought it was fine and don’t plan on seeking it out or
avoiding it for that matter.

And
that’s kind of pretty much exactly how I feel about “Monsters University.” It
was fine. Occasionally it was very funny, but the story suffered from the
prequel curse of predictability.

It’s
essentially “When Mike met Sully.” Spoiler alert … seriously … They don’t start
out as best friends. In fact, they’re kind of enemies. Mike is the lovable
underdog out to prove himself to the world, Sully is the kid from the famous
family. They both wind up in MU’s famed scarer program, start competing with
each other and run afoul of the dean and get kicked out said program.

Of
course, there just so happens to be a major scaring contest coming up and Mike
bets the dean that if they win, they can rejoin the scarer program. The only
catch is they need the help of the dorkiest, least scary frat on campus in
order to win.

Can
Mike and Sully turn their lovable bands of doofs into terror machines? You’ll
just have to watch the movie to find out.

If
there’s one lesson I learned from “Monsters University” --- see what I did
there? --- it’s that Charlie Day needs to be in everything. The fact that he’s
not the most in-demand comedic actor out there right now is one of our nation’s
greatest shames.

Day
makes everything better. He plays a lower case “n” shaped monster that’s in
Mike and Sully’s frat. Not surprisingly, Day can lay claim to nearly all of the
movie’s biggest laughs. Without him, I’m not saying this could have been “Cars
2” territory, but who knows? I won’t say it officially, because I never
actually saw “Cars 2,” but I heard stories.

“Monsters
University” doesn’t live up to some of Pixar’s heavyweights, but it’s OK. I
think my lady friend liked it more than I did.

It’s funny enough and well-paced enough
that, even though it’s predictable, it never crosses over into boring. Also,
Billy Crystal and John Goodman are back as the main monsters and they’re pretty
awesome too.

But
Charlie Day, ya’ll. Charlie Day.

Not
long after we saw “Monsters Unviersity,” we checked out the sequel to a movie
we both really loved, 2010’s “Despicable Me.”

Monday, July 1, 2013

The
reason I bring up the star of “Howie Do It” and “Bobby’s World” is because the famed
germaphobe knows his way around the fist bump, and this simple act of tapping
your knuckles against those of another man – or sometimes woman – has been
causing me a lot of headaches recently.

I’ve got a light dusting of OCD, so
washing my hands is a pretty important thing for me. I do it a lot. Not to the
point that it holds me back from living my life such as it is, but I still
think I wash my hands more often and more thoroughly than the average man.

Anyway, one thing I don’t do
thoroughly is dry my hands. I prefer a good air dry. I’ll use paper towels if
they’re available, but I tend to get carried away. Before I know it I’ve gone
through a couple dozen of them, and somehow my hands are still not 100% dry. Like
the Great Pyramids of Egypt, I can’t explain this, it just is.